


Ask it and so it shall be

by destinyofshipwreck



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M, Oral Sex, Phone Sex, green room sex, the distant future of 2022
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-08 03:27:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21229010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinyofshipwreck/pseuds/destinyofshipwreck
Summary: "We've done interviews a million times, I don't need to relax," he says."It's been a while," she says again, and he shrugs, rising from his chair and stepping toward her.She rests her palms on his biceps and he follows her lead after a moment, cupping his hands over her shoulder blades, a tactful distance between their bodies, and he takes one deliberate slow breath, and another.Their familiar push-and-pull, even after years away, gives her a choice: yield to his breath, or disrupt it.





	Ask it and so it shall be

He doesn't hug her in the green room or even shake her hand, but when Tessa strolls in from makeup at twenty past eight to find Scott waiting there, he does silently offer her a bottle of water pulled from a bucket of melting ice, passing it to her across a card table on which a bowl of fruit and a laminated copy of the call sheet are arranged.

"I missed you," she says. "It's been a while. How've you been." It's been a year, at least. And he's been just fine, judging by the sporadic familial social media updates of which she'd been kept apprised through the grapevine.

"Keeping busy," he says. "But someone's coming to get us in five, so we can catch up later maybe, if you have time for breakfast after this."

"Yeah, I think that could work," she says.

They're both in town for a few days, for a remote TV analysis gig and nostalgic career retrospective interview, it being an Olympic year. Sometime since she'd been to the CBC last they'd removed the enormous mural of her and Scott from the elevator.

He's visibly nervous, sweat beaded on his forehead, jaw tense, and indecisive about his hands, fiddling with a water bottle cap and his tie, tugging on the points of his collar. She can see through it that he'd put the stays in upside down; there's a faint black logo visible underneath the thin white poplin.

"We'd better relax," she adds. "Makeup is gonna cry if you sweat off your face before anyone sees it. Come here."

"We've done interviews a million times, I don't need to relax," he says.

"It's been a while," she says again, and he shrugs, rising from his chair and stepping toward her.

She rests her palms on his biceps and he follows her lead after a moment, cupping his hands over her shoulder blades, a tactful distance between their bodies, and he takes one deliberate slow breath, and another.

Their familiar push-and-pull, even after years away, gives her a choice: yield to his breath, or disrupt it. _ It's a mistake either way, _ she thinks.

The thrill of control wells up in her chest, and she follows it decisively, staggers her breaths opposite his; he steps back from the embrace after only a few moments more of the off-kilter breaths, looking away. His jaw, though, she notices, is unclenched, and after he sits back down on the other side of the table, he rests his hands loosely in his lap.

The interview is a softball that her agent had arranged with the network, only a retrospective of the rule changes they'd competed through, a forecast of tomorrow's rhythm dance, and commonplaces about the Olympic experience that she and Scott could recite in their sleep, and it's over in fifteen minutes.

"I missed you, too," says Scott, back in the green room, once the door is closed behind them.

"You could've called," she says.

"I guess, but you didn't call either," he says.

"I'm gonna hug you for real even though we're both jerks who never called and neither of us deserve it," she says, deadpan, and he cracks a smile, a real one, not his interview grimace.

He wraps his arms around her again and she sinks into the embrace this time, matching her breath to his, and she feels his heartbeat slow where her cheek is pressed against his neck.

She shifts slightly, tilting her head to press her lips to his collarbone, tilting her pelvis to arch her back under his hands, and the pulse quickens. Then a telltale throb against her pubis, and Scott twists away, muttering something indistinct, his face deeply flushed, too flustered even to apologize.

"No," she says. "This is good, it's good, I want this. Come here."

He does, and he doesn't turn away from her again, not even when she sinks to her knees in front of him and unbuckles his belt and unbuttons his dress slacks, tugging them down his thighs.

Her lipstick that morning was applied in layers: pencil all over underneath, a deep blue-red liquid formula that dried to a powdery matte, and a paler gloss on top to soften it for the cameras. Only the gloss is liable to transfer, she expects, and she tries it, smearing her saliva the length of his cock with her hand before kissing him where her hand had been, open-mouthed.

One of his hands is clenched into a fist around the hem of his shirt, and the fingertips of the other are pressed into his thigh. She takes the hand in one of hers and moves it to her hair, and he makes a sound that's nearly a sob, stroking a flyaway back from her cheek, then cupping her jaw in his palm.

He's as easy for her as he's always been.

She pulls back from him to drag it out, stroking him and kissing just the tip of his cock, smearing his precome where the gloss is probably smeared off; when she takes him further into her mouth, he pulls back from her, tentative, not pushing into her and not wrapping his fist around her hair. His eyes are closed tight whenever she ventures a glance upward. She murmurs an endearment around him and his hand on her jaw trembles and he cracks, pressing deep, and coming into the back of her throat, biting his lip to keep from making a sound; and she presses her own lips tightly around him as he draws himself out, and he shudders, his legs nearly buckling, and sags onto a folding chair.

"I dunno if this is what they meant by taking a few minutes to freshen up before we leave," he says, after a few moments, still stroking her hair. The green room is someone's repurposed windowless office, and there's no sink or washroom nearby, only a vanity with an extra magnifying mirror and a ring light for touchups. He frowns at the stack of napkins next to the fruit bowl and takes a couple, mops himself up halfheartedly.

The gloss stains, she knows, and she can still see it there when she sits back on her heels and he zips himself back up, a corona around the tip of his cock and more smears of pink disappearing into his pubic hair and at the tops of his thighs.

"I've been doing a lot more TV than you lately, so you can take my word for it that it's not what they meant," she says. "Grab me another water, would you?"

She inspects herself in the mirror on the vanity; the layer of gloss is gone completely, and the matte has begun to feather at the edges, but it hardly seems worth taking off and reapplying for breakfast. She leaves it be, downing half the water Scott hands her and tucking the bottle into her purse.

"How's your wife, anyway," she says, looking up at him, and he shakes his head.

"Separated," he says.

He isn't wearing a wedding ring. She hadn't noticed; she'd hardly ever seen him with it on, just glimpsed it in other people's photos on social media that she'd quickly clicked away from.

"God," she says. "Scott. I'm so sorry, I didn't—"

"I haven't told anyone," he says. "Except, you know. I've been sleeping on the couch at the shop, so. A few people found out."

"I really am sorry," she says.

"I bet you are," he says.

"Let me buy you breakfast," she says. "For being insensitive."

"You can buy me breakfast, but not for that," he says. "Maybe for not sending me a wedding present, though."

She'll disown Jordan if her sister never sent a gift from her after they discussed it. Her horror at the prospect must be written on her face, because Scott cackles and slaps her on the shoulder.

"You gave us a huge cast iron pot," he says. "It cost four hundred dollars, and nobody ever used it. It was very gracious of you. It's probably still at the house."

"You're funny," she says. "And you're paying for your own damn breakfast."

When they emerge from the CBC into the snowy morning, she tugs the collar of her coat high up her neck and wraps her scarf over her hair. Scott leaves his peacoat unbuttoned but shoves his hands in the pockets. No one recognizes them, or if anyone does, no one stops them for a conversation or a photograph.

There's a Cora's a few blocks away and at nine-thirty on a Thursday there's no line. She and Scott are shown to a shadowy corner booth close to the window, halfway frosted over.

Scott rests a companionable hand on her knee while they order crepes, the left hand, without the ring. He slides it up her thigh underneath her skirt after the waitress has turned to leave, and she raises an eyebrow without looking at him.

"You wouldn't," she says in a low voice. "First of all, I don't know where your hands have been, and second of all, there's not even any tablecloths here."

"I wouldn't do what," he says.

"Third of all, these are tights and not stockings, so you couldn't if you wanted to."

"Before today I would've thought we were past wanting anything from each other," he says, tone casual. "But you only ever wanted things you thought you couldn't have." His hand is still warm from his coat pocket, and he loosens his grip on her, spreading his fingers wide.

"We made a lot of mistakes together," she says.

"This was never one," he says. His fingertips have paused at her inner midthigh and are tracing leisurely circles there, and she's lightheaded, her breathing shallow.

"I don't like myself when I'm with you," she says, and he raises an eyebrow himself. "I mean, I don't like that it makes me possessive, I don't like that I like when you're possessive about me—"

"—but you like this," he says.

"I do," she says.

"Did you like it when we used to walk to breakfast at Fabergé on the Plateau," he says, dropping his voice to a murmur. "Right after I fucked you, with your hair still a mess, and—"

"I did," she says.

It takes everything in her power not to shift her hips toward his hand, and she's trembling with the effort.

"You just don't like that you liked it," he says, and squeezes her thigh.

"You get me," she says.

"Two black coffees, one decaf," says the waitress, setting a pair of mugs on the table and startling them both.

"You're a hero," says Tessa. Scott returns his hand to her knee and leaves it there until their crepes arrive, one strawberry with a side of double bacon and one chocolate hazelnut, and he doesn't touch her again, except to gently push her hand away from the bill, which he pays in cash.

"What room are you in," he asks on their way out the door.

"Oh," she says. "I'm not staying at the hotel, I've got a place in Toronto now." It's a two-bedroom in an old cinderblock walkup in the Annex, and it covers its own annual cost in the building's short-term rental pool forty-four weeks of the year, and she leaves it appointed like a hotel the rest of the time when she uses it herself. Bleached white linens and towels, autumn landscape prints on the walls, Condé Nast magazine subscriptions, a biweekly floral arrangement delivery, an empty refrigerator.

"Fancy," he says. "Call time is five tomorrow, wanna meet up for breakfast first? They're delivering me something at the hotel at four, you could come over."

"I already have plans with my sister, you wouldn't want to be invited," she says. "But I'll see you in the green room again before."

He stands back a few paces while she flags down a passing cab. "See you," he says, as it pulls up to the curb.

She has the cab drop her off in standstill traffic at Brunswick and Bloor to walk the last few blocks. The condo is chilly inside, the way she left it, the thermostat set to 17. The bedroom window admits a draft, and she draws the blackout curtain over it against the cold daylight, and she wraps herself in a quilt, and shakes the duvet out over the bed, and buries herself underneath it.

The next morning is a pre-rhythm dance backgrounder with analysis to follow, the commentary having been assigned to someone else, and a fifty-minute break between, during which someone’s PA shows them to a second, smaller green room with a Keurig and a pair of old chesterfields.

The door clicks shut behind her, and Scott flicks the twist lock with his thumb.

"That felt good," she says. "You sounded good. I could talk to my guys at TSN if you want to think about doing more of it next season, I dunno if you're too busy with the shop, but let me know."

"You only compliment me behind closed doors now, or what," he says.

"It's character-building for you to know you have to work for it," she says.

"Is that so," he says. He'd sidestepped partway around her and she's standing between him and one of the chesterfields, which she only realizes when he moves toward her and she steps back to match him, and the backs of her knees touch the well-worn upholstery leather.

"Yeah, it is," she says, and sprawls on the chesterfield, knees splayed.

He lowers himself to the floor in front of her, and exhales when he slides his hands up her silk brocade dress and finds that she's not wearing tights, but thigh-high stockings, black lace garter belt and all, with a matching black silk charmeuse thong pulled over it.

"You came prepared," he says.

"What did I just say about working for it," she says, and he laughs, and kisses the soft skin at the top of her stockings, one thigh, then the other; pulls the thong gently off, setting it on the couch next to her; then kisses her hands, her palms and fingertips, until she grabs his hair and guides him back between her legs.

He traces the perimeter of her vulva with his fingertips, spreading her apart; then his tongue, then his teeth, nipping her labia, and he doesn't slide his fingers inside her.

He wants her to ask him for it, she knows, and she resolves not to give him the satisfaction, even as her hips jerk toward his mouth outside her control, and her breath catches in her throat, and she wants something inside her, more than anything.

Her clit is between his teeth now, his tongue flicking lightly over her, and his fingers still spreading her lewdly apart and smearing her wetness around her, and he slides one hand up her body and presses his fingers into her mouth, and she moans wordlessly around them, and it’s hardly a relief when he pushes her over the edge and she comes in a flood in his mouth, her cunt throbbing and aching and empty.

"Fuck you," she says once she's caught her breath.

"You wish," he says, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. "How's your boyfriend."

"Six foot four," she says, and he snorts. "Erik's not in town. He signed to a KHL team during the lockout, I'll see him in a few months. Which you should know, if you've been googling us."

"Sounds complicated."

"It is and it isn't," she says. "I mean, it's—"

"Not exclusive?"

"Right," she says.

"Good to know some things never change," he says, leaning forward to plant a kiss on the inside of her thigh. His fingers, still wet from her cunt and her mouth, are twisted around the hair that's come loose from her sleek chignon. "Do you still talk when he's out of town?"

"Sometimes," she says.

Erik had indulged her when she asked him to introduce her to Swedish dirty talk: she'd wanted new words that tasted unfamiliar, and the phonemes all take shape in a different part of her mouth than anything she'd say in her suburban Ontario accent. She'd asked him to narrate while she kissed his neck and collarbone, down his chest, took his cock in her hand and smeared his precome down the length of it, followed her fingers with her tongue, climbed astride him and squeezed hard around him, leaned back and reached down and stroked herself to an orgasm with his cock throbbing inside her, repeating back the words to him for as long as they could speak, laughing about the inadequacy of her conversational vocabulary afterward, and how much work she would have to put in if she ever wanted to meet his mother.

Since he's been away they've kept up the practice with FaceTime when he can spare an hour in the evening and she's free in the afternoon, him telling her what he wished he could do to her, her trying to interpret on the fly and show him at the same time, fumbling with her phone in her left hand.

"Does he mind when you come home fucked apart," says Scott, softly.

The rush of his possessiveness still sends a shiver up her spine, and an answering shiver of distaste at herself for knowing better and choosing, sometimes, not to care.

"I'm my own person and I fuck who I want," she says.

He nods, and kisses her thigh again, then her cunt, swollen almost to bruised from his teeth.

"Tell me if you want me to stop," he says, and she shakes her head.

He's slower and more meticulous this time with the flat of his tongue parting her labia and his hands gripping her dress. She claps one of her own hands over her mouth to stifle her whimper when he slides the tip of his tongue underneath her clitoral hood, where she's so sensitive she can hardly stand to be touched, and he gives her space, sucking her between his soft lips instead, then returning with his tongue. She's dimly aware of one of her heels digging into the small of his back and the other braced against the arm of the chesterfield, and when she comes again it aches even more than the first time, and he still doesn't slide inside her, not even his tongue to taste her.

This morning's coral lipstick is slick and nowhere near transfer-proof, and it's all over her palm, and probably the rest of her face. Her hair is a sweaty wreck.

"Twenty minutes," says Scott, anticipating her panicked question, his voice pitched low and gentle. "We've got lots of time to put you back together. I didn't crease your dress. It's okay, Tess, we've got this."

There's time, even, for an entire cup of coffee, after she's fixed her lipstick and foundation and rearranged her hair, before the PA summons them again, and their analysis is sharp enough that the host thanks them again afterward for their expertise and time, and tells them, genuinely, that he's looking forward to more tomorrow.

In the green room she yelps when she pulls on her jeans, still aching nearly too much to be touched, and Scott ruffles her hair fondly and kisses her forehead.

"If I don't get a nap in the next half an hour I'll die on the spot," she tells him outside. "Not to love you and leave you."

"We do what we must," he says, and flags down a cab for her himself.

She stops the cab near the domed stadium on Bathurst this time, on a whim, and walks briskly up the couple of blocks to Good for Her, and the flurry from the street follows her in the door. A duplicate of the purple vibrator with the flattened tip in her nightstand drawer at home is on a display stand on the near wall, and she pays for it in cash, a little irritated at herself for the waste of re-buying something she already has, in perfect working order, only a couple of hours away, but not irritated enough to overcome her feeling of urgency.

In the condo with the deadbolt latched, she tears open the box and plugs in the toy, paces in the living room, puts the kettle on for tea, drumming her fingers on the marble countertop until enough time seems to have elapsed. It's eleven at night in Moscow. She retreats to the bedroom and pulls off her jeans, draping them over the armchair in the corner, and crawls into bed, turning on the vibrator to test the battery and finding it charged enough. She's still so slick that when she pushes it against herself there's no resistance, and she slides it in and out experimentally, finding the right angle all of a sudden with a gasp.

She FaceTimes Erik, whose phone must be off, and records a couple audio messages for him instead, forgetting her Swedish, whimpering through her wish that he was there with her.

Then, impulsively, she calls Scott, who picks up on the first ring.

"Hi," he says. "Everything okay? I thought you were going home to sleep."

"You're an asshole for making me wait," she says, and he laughs, sounding incredulous.

"Do you want me to come over there and show you how much I don't want to wait," he says. "I'm just at the hotel. Where are you, I'll get an Uber."

"No," she says. "I'm close, just talk me through."

"Are you fucking yourself when you're still wet from me," he says.

"Please," she says.

She hears him draw a ragged breath and exhale it slowly.

"You cut me off earlier," he says. "In the diner when we were talking about brunches in Montreal. I loved it when you wanted me to fuck you right before our reservations, you wanted it in such a hurry, and knowing that you wanted me to take you out with my come still dripping out of you—God, Tess."

She's so slick she can barely find purchase on herself, and she sets her phone on speaker, on the pillow next to her face, with both hands on her body, one on the vibrator, tilting it forward and back inside her as far as she can reach, the other stroking her swollen clit.

"What else," she says.

"Tess," he says again, hoarser now. "You have the most beautiful pussy. I just—I wanted to see you and taste you before I felt you. I missed your cunt so much. You're so beautiful when you come, I needed you to come in my mouth, I needed to swallow all of you. I love fucking you, I'm so sorry we couldn't make it work together—"

Anything else he might have said is drowned out by the rush of blood to her head and the clatter of the phone to the floor, as the force of her orgasm rolls through her abdomen to her shoulders and she pulls her hands away from herself, suddenly too sensitive even for her own touch, and overwhelmed by a giggling fit.

"Sorry," she calls to the phone on the floor, "Give me a second," untangling the bedding and reaching for it where it's fallen between the bed and the nightstand, "I dropped my phone, if you couldn't tell."

"That good, huh," he says, as she retrieves it and props it up on the nightstand. Her hands are still trembling and she can hardly breathe from laughter.

"It's pretty dysfunctional that I only came when said you were sorry," she collects herself long enough to say, and then she dissolves again.

"Well, when you put it that way," he says, but he's laughing too.

They breathe together for a few minutes, and she almost misses him in bed with her.

"You should tell me what you've been doing," he says eventually, a tactful interval after her last outburst of laughter. "You sound like you're doing well."

"Grief counselling, actually," she says, picking the phone back up and turning it off speaker, as though the conversation was not one to be overheard. "It's kind of mixed therapeutic modes, mostly CBT. It helped."

The therapist is an older woman with an impassive expression and an after-hours practice in a beautifully restored Georgian house. She'd wobbled out of the intake session as unsteady as a fawn, not ready to hear the list of wretched, untrue things she believed about herself all recited in series, like someone who'd never been to therapy before.

"Grief," says Scott. "Not life coaching, then? You mean, because of us, or the transition, or—"

"All of it," she says. No amount of life coaching or career seminars or positive visualization exercises had unstuck the knot of fear in her stomach, or convinced her that she could be enough by herself, as she was, not one-half of a team, not in relation to anyone else. She's still not convinced, though she knows now that she is only Tessa, even if sometimes she's willing to share.

"You've been lifting heavy, too," says Scott. "It looks good on you."

"It's fun to have time to try different things," she says. She'd avoided the gym for a couple of months after their touring obligations were extinguished, but had eventually made her way back to it, not knowing how to adapt her training without a specific list of functional needs, trying new things one after the other.

"I'm proud of you, kiddo," he says.

"Don't say that like I'm finished with anything," she says. "It's a whole process, Scott, and just because you haven't let it catch up to you yet, because you've buried yourself in pussy or marriage or whatever—"

"—like you buried yourself in TV contracts and ad campaigns," he interjects.

"An _ongoing_ process," she says.

"I like this fantasy life you invented for me, though," he says. "It was a lot less glamorous than that. Our upstairs tenant didn't renew their lease and we couldn't find a replacement, so I've been spending a lot of nights watching Netflix on my phone on a couch in an empty ballet studio."

"I'm not gonna feel sorry for you no matter how pathetic you make yourself sound," she says. "Though it is pretty stupid if you got kicked out of your own house."

"I'm not gonna feel sorry for you either, even if you have a weird sex hangup about apologies now," he says, and laughter overtakes her again.

"We have a detente," she says. "But I think I do actually have to sleep now, we gotta be back at the CBC at four in the morning."

"I'll see you there, then," he says. "Goodnight, Tess." He ends the call before she can, and she's left looking at her phone, and a handful of message notifications from Erik, but she sets it back on the nightstand and wraps herself in the quilt again, and falls asleep almost immediately.

The air is so thick with intention between them that she can hardly breathe during their last round of televised analysis in the studio: the two hours between hair and makeup, the hour of video review to contextualize their analysis, the hour of waiting, the hour on air, and the hour of shaking hands and signing autographs afterward and promising to stay in touch, before they find themselves back in the folding chairs and card table green room to take off their TV makeup and change into street clothes.

She locks the green room door behind them this time and practically launches herself into his arms once she's tugged off her pantsuit, wraps her legs around him, shifts her centre of balance around to push him against the wall, where he pivots to press her against it. She fumbles with his belt and his fly and shoves herself onto him as soon as she’s released his cock, her legs wrapped around his waist and his hands on her ribcage, and she's still so swollen that it aches when he slides into her, even though she's been wet enough for hours.

"I figure we've got maybe ten minutes before somebody gets impatient," he whispers into her ear. "You set the pace."

The pace is slow. She rocks her pelvis back and forth, squeezing the length of him, and his eyes widen, like he'd forgotten what it was like with her.

"That's long enough to make you come inside me and walk out of here with time to spare," she whispers back, squeezing harder, in rhythm with the subtle movement of her hips.

He groans and buries his face in her neck, breathing hard, and she works him with her pelvic floor until there's sweat dripping down the back of his neck, and she pushes him over the edge with her hands in his hair, tugging hard and bearing down against his hips driving up into her, and this time the sound he makes really is a sob, and he lowers her gently to the ground and wraps his arms around her once she's settled on her own feet again, his chest heaving.

"Five minutes still on the clock," she whispers. "Take your time."

He hadn't brought street clothes with him to change into, but he hands her the blouse and jeans she'd brought with her in a tote bag that morning, his face still burning, and seeming not quite able to speak.

"So what's next for you," he says at last, helping her into her coat.

"I'm about to go back to my place and claw you out of me in the shower, then get on a plane to Vancouver," she says. He twists his face into an exaggerated pained expression.

"And you'll tell your guys at TSN that I have some free time," he says.

"Sure," she says.

"And you'll send me the name of your therapist," he says.

"You'd be scared of her," she says. "Find your own."

"I'll keep you posted," he says.

She does reach inside herself in the shower, feeling bereft where he filled her; but her flight is in the midafternoon, and without time to waste she scrubs the smell of his sweat off her skin briskly with a loofah from her suitcase, and then packs to leave, stripping the bed for the housekeeping service, taking the floral arrangement from the kitchen counter to leave for the unit next to hers, and locking the door behind her with the keycode.

_Good luck with the divorce,_ she types in a text message to him from the departure lounge at Pearson, then deletes it.

_Told you so_, she types, and deletes that, too.

Then, _See you soon,_ she settles on, _I hope_ in its own message afterward, and sets her phone to airplane mode, and tucks it back into her purse.


End file.
